by Scott Vold, CEO and Co-Founder
Today’s healthcare leaders need to grow revenue and cut costs simultaneously – creating a marketplace that offers great opportunities, along with tremendous potential for failure.
Providers have looked to their EMRs, deployed analytics, sought consumer and mobile tools to increase patient retention, and expanded their reach into ambulatory settings. Yet the combined benefit of these approaches still leaves providers short in their need to aggressively cut costs and grow top-line revenue.
Forward-thinking healthcare executives are recognizing that managing referrals and leakage can hold the key to growing meaningful top-line revenue while delivering margin and cost protection in the evolving fee-for-value model. Our new white paper, “The Hundred Million Dollar Opportunity: Why it’s time to fix the broken referral process,” provides new data and insights into the size of this problem and how to fix it.
We recently commissioned Sage Growth Partners to survey over 100 healthcare executives about patient leakage. We were surprised that 23% don’t know what patient leakage costs them and another 43% are losing over 10% of revenues. These losses are staggering. They also represent an untapped opportunity to reform the way we manage referrals. We’ll share more of the data from that survey in an upcoming post.
Today, referrals still depend more on personal relationships and fax machines than on data and smart technology. The advanced technology we apply to other aspects of healthcare too often aren’t applied to managing referrals.
The problem demands a new approach and a greater appreciation for how a reimagined referral management process can fundamentally alter the clinical and financial power of providers. Quite simply, referrals should rank at the top of the list of solutions that executive teams consider to grow revenue, manage costs, and improve quality.
Success won’t be achieved by taking a passive approach. It will require a willingness to embrace new solutions to manage referrals and a recognition that standing still on this issue is a bit like business malpractice.
The good news is that this broken referral process can be fixed and that the return on investment (ROI) for managing it is enormous. Solutions that analyze the complex referral process in real time and enable organizations to optimally manage referrals are available. Our white paper discusses how much healthcare organizations are losing today, and how much they stand to gain by making a making a modest investment in a purpose-built solution that can analyze referrals and enable them to manage it for the benefit of their organization and all of its stakeholders, including patients.



